February 11, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Kensington, Philadelphia, has earned grim nicknames: The Walmart of Heroin, The Las Vegas of Drugs.

You might have seen the viral videos—people slumped over, nodding off, sprawled on sidewalks, the streets littered with needles. Manhattan Institute Fellow Charles Fain Lehman witnessed it firsthand when he visited last year. The neighborhood operates as the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast.

“In most places, you need to know the right person to score; in Kensington, it’s easy to ‘cold cop,’” writes Lehman. “Just approach one of the ubiquitous groups of corner boys and make a buy. If help is needed, guides will direct you, for a fee.”

It’s not just fentanyl. Meth, crack, PCP, and xylazine—better known as tranq—are all easily available. The drug supply is vast, cheap, and varied, drawing addicts from far and wide. “If you get hooked on xylazine, you need to stay near a supply of the drug to stay ‘well.’ If the only place to get it is Kensington, then Kensington is where you stay,” Lehman explains.

In CJ’s winter issue, he surveys Kensington’s history and explores what, if anything, can be done to close its drug market. Read his gripping article here.

Charles Fain Lehman

Inside the East Coast’s Largest Open-Air Drug Market

Can Philadelphia clean up Kensington’s squalor?

Fears of market concentration in artificial intelligence have many on edge, with concerns that a handful of powerful companies could dominate the field. But the rise of Chinese startup DeepSeek—delivering cutting-edge AI advancements at a fraction of the cost of its U.S. counterparts—upends that narrative, writes Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics. “Just as Palm and BlackBerry didn’t see the iPhone coming, so, too, may today’s AI leaders find their positions undermined by innovations they didn’t anticipate and players they never worried about,” he maintains.

Universities’ leftward tilt is no secret—but it’s getting worse. The Left’s dominance “presents an intellectual problem, as it gives license to theory-laden interpretations of reality and declining rigor,” says Gabriel Rossman, a professor of sociology at UCLA. Consider the widely cited 2020 PNAS article claiming that black babies had lower mortality rates under black doctors. The authors failed to control for birth weight—a glaring oversight. “Such a left-wing bias—and the errors that it enables—should embarrass the academy,” argues Rossman. Read his ideas for how conservatives should address the issue here.

It's budget season in New York. And that means the governor has yet again proposed a massive, unaffordable plan for the state's upcoming fiscal year.

Governor Kathy Hochul's $252 billion proposal funds a slew of pet projects, including a 17 percent surge in the Empire State’s already nation-leading education spending. She also extends her predecessor Andrew Cuomo’s devastating tax on high-income filers, which has helped drive talent and capital from New York.

Adjunct fellow E.J. McMahon breaks down Hochul’s reckless spending and the state’s worsening fiscal outlook. “Hochul’s projected budget gaps,” he writes, “are a stubborn reminder that her proposals will eventually need to be paid for.”

Read his sober assessment here.

“There is no ‘we’ here. There are Los Angeles citizens and the government they elected. The government they elected is in love with regulations, in love with dogma, and highly allergic to competence. That does not bode well for the homeowners. It does not bode well for the taxpayers who have to see their hard-earned money squandered by fools.”

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City Journal reader, commenting on how Los Angeles can be rebuilt